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> A decade later, participation in elite circles like media, academia, and politics is based on how convincingly one can be seen to parrot obvious untruths, no

• bboygravity 3y ago
  Random examples that I can think of: Trump has/had (strong) ties with Russia, needed those Russian ties to win the election and used them to win the elections. People still believe this to this day. Globally.
  • lern_too_spel 3y ago
    > People still believe this to this day. Who? It is accepted that Trump got help from Russia and that he publicly asked for it. It is not accepted that he has strong ties with Russia, and unlike what the GGP has claimed, there is no "official" story saying that. The only person who did say that was private investigator Steele, in a dossier that Clinton didn't believe and discarded but that McCain did and leaked.
    • pstuart 3y ago
      As I understand it, the Wikileaks DNC email dump was just a front for Russia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Democratic_National_Committee_email_leak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Democratic_National_Commi...
      • nyolfen 3y ago
        more realistically, it was israel: https://www.thenation.com/article/world/trump-israel-collusion/ https://www.thenation.com/article/world/trump-israel-collusi... perhaps you recall trump’s first two acts in office — recognizing jerusalem as israel’s capital, and sanctioning russia. curious!
        • pstuart 3y ago
          Ha! Makes sense. I abhor partisan politics but there are things associated with (e.g., Trump) that call for scrutiny. Trump is a fascinating character and has broken so many norms that it's been mind bending. It saddens me that HN has many of his rabid acolytes that make any such discussion a shit show.
          • splendor_spoon 3y ago
            The GP comment is not telling the whole story. Yes the first thing _congress_ did was pass additional sanctions on Russia but Trump delayed [1] them from going into affect for over a year allowing more than enough time for Russia to mitigate the impact significantly. [1] https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Politics/timeline-trumps-delays-russia-sanctions/story?id=50733408 https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Politics/timeline-trumps-delays-r...
            • pstuart 3y ago
              There's so much more to explore, but not here. It blows my mind that there are so many rabid supporters here on HN. There's no point in dialog there because there's no interest in that. That said, we should be exploring how to hack society to "improve efficiency at scale", and that requires discussing policy and that is what politics is ostensibly all about. C'est la guerre.
      • ok123456 3y ago
        Why wasn't there a discussion of the contents of the leaks, that the DNC did everything in their power to coronate Hillary, and only a discussion of the leak's provenance?
        • acdha 3y ago
          There was a ton of discussion about those claims but it largely stalked because the leaked emails didn’t show anything significant. You can still find Bernie die-hards claiming a conspiracy but they’re generally ignored because there’s no evidence that he did anything but lose fairly.
        • lern_too_spel 3y ago
          There was. Only barely literate morons and Russian social media astroturfers interpreted the leaked documents that way.
        • pstuart 3y ago
          There was plenty of discussion of the DNC crowning Hillary. I'm pissed about it to this day. What's your point?
        • elihu 3y ago
          It was discussed at the time. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz resigned as DNC chair over what was in the emails. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/24/debbie-wasserman-schultz-resigns-dnc-chair-emails-sanders https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/24/debbie-wasse...
      • pydry 3y ago
        which is often accused, although never proven. when putin accuses media he doesnt like of being foreign agents without proof we can recognize how transparently self serving it is. wouldnt you agree?
  • api 3y ago
    Trump openly asked for help from Russia on national TV. I don’t see how the existence of some degree of Russian collusion is debatable given that it was done in the open. I do agree that there are people who vastly overestimate the extent or effectiveness of whatever Russia did do. Trump won due to general discontent with the status quo coupled with the fact that Hillary Clinton was a politically tone deaf candidate who ran a terrible campaign. If anything Russia did succeeded it’s because it was able to capitalize on this dynamic.
    • redeeman 3y ago
      [flagged]
      • vlovich123 3y ago
        Makes a fun sound bite but given the context was he was speaking about a program for people to navigate voter suppression, do you really think he has a secret voter fraud plan and accidentally revealed it like that Politicians speak a lot and I know I myself can mix up words sometimes and I don’t speak nearly enough. > OK, trump wanted the TRUTH to come out, he wanted facts exposed to the american people, that admittedly benefitted him, but still, facts relating to illegalities to his political opponent. That’s just clearly false. > Russia tried to hack Hillary Clinton’s office five hours after Trump called on Moscow to find her deleted emails https://www.vox.com/world/2019/4/19/18507580/mueller-report-trump-russia-obstruction-summary https://www.vox.com/world/2019/4/19/18507580/mueller-report-... So basically Trump solicited a third party to commit a crime on his behalf. As far as I know that makes you an accessory. Also Russia later also hacked the RNC so the lack of release of anything incriminating there leads a reasonable person to conclude I think that they have blackmail info on the RNC that they’re holding back because they have an agreement with the elites in that party. Notice how especially pro-Putin right wing media has been since that time period. The Meuller report is pretty thorough. If you haven’t read it at least find unbiased analysis of what it shows.
        • redeeman 3y ago
          > Russia tried to hack Hillary Clinton’s office five hours after Trump called on Moscow to find her deleted emails Emails that were deleted in a crime, that should have been public record. so while he may have been soliciting a crime (he didnt, and there were never charges, also, if you knew ANYTHING about trump, you knew he joked when he said that. but regardless), he wanted the truth to come out > think that they have blackmail info on the RNC that they’re holding back because they have an agreement with the elites in that party. yeah you think, but you have no evidence, its entirely possible there was nothing there, and we have some evidence to point to that, regardless of how criminal the RNC may have been(and they are for sure every bit as bad as the democrats), in that Trump has talked plenty about how he put great effort to not having any digital copies of important stuff that COULD be hacked, and in addition to that, invest in "cybersecurity"
  • sanderjd 3y ago
    The only incorrect part of that is that it played an important role in his winning the election. But that part isn't necessary for the whole thing to be very bad, in my view.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• theaussiestew 3y ago
  Basically anyone who sits at a panel, interview or a discussion and talks about geopolitical affairs. It’s the space around politics and think tanks and national security. There’s an implicit expectation that you talk about certain topics in a certain way, and that way usually conforms to the narrative that’s acceptable to the apparatus of power. It’s a vague description but that’s because of the nature of this unspoken expectation. More concrete examples would be how you’re expected to just completely agree that Russia and China are essentially evil and enemies. Like that’s the unspoken premise. Or in the US, playing this game of theatre around how Democrats or Republicans are bad. I’m not American but there’s a talk show host called Tucker Carlson who goes around talking about how Democrats are ridiculous and holds all these inflammatory and demagogue views on air, but is known to be completely normal and reasonable off air and in his private life. That’s the kind of skill that’s seen as necessary in these kinds of “elite” circles, where you’re just expected to be able to hold two contradicting views and milk them to your advantage. You’re expected to be able to peddle mistruths and warp facts convincingly and worse, you’re seen as higher status and more “refined” for being about to pull this off convincingly. Another example I’m reminded of is an Australian one, where a think tank that is funded by arms manufacturers called ASPI, had its CEO defend itself on live television. As you’d expect, he was surprisingly able to spin a tale where they were seen as the good guys using all sorts of deception and rhetorical tricks. I don’t know how these people sleep at night but it’s the very definition of double think from 1984. I do believe more people will see this subtle aspect of how opinion is shaped in future.
  • FormerBandmate 3y ago
    Russia commits countless war crimes on a daily basis (there is tons of documentation) and China has concentration camps. America is not perfect but they are legitimately much worse
    • theaussiestew 3y ago
      This is the exact narrative that I’m talking about. It’s a hand wavy pseudo intellectual narrative that goes, Russia commits war crimes and kills civilians, China is Nazi Germany 2.0 and is trying to exterminate Muslims like the Nazis tried to do with the Jews and America is bad, you know with even more casualties in the Middle East but it’s not as bad as these cartoonishly evil regimes. I mean no offence to you by calling it hand wavy and pseudo intellectual but this is the exact attitude I’m talking about. It goes, “Everybody knows [something] [something]” and that’s usually a big warning sign for me; I know because I had to examine some of my own beliefs that way and it was painful to realise that most of it was talking points I had unfortunately picked up from so called thought leaders. It’s a lot to unpack and I’m not going to discuss Russia because a lot of that is actually true, but why don’t you hold America to the same standards? Also regarding the concentration camps thing, this is another narrative. Can you describe to me what you think is going on in China? I’m genuinely curious. My understanding, after a lot of research and incredulity is that it’s essentially China’s version of Guantanamo Bay, because you know, they had terrorist attacks where there were hundreds killed in stabbings in Xinjiang but you probably don’t know about that right? It seems all that people know is the pictures of lots of Muslims sitting in blue overalls behind wired fences, which has been deliberately used to evoke comparisons to gas chambers and the Holocaust, by ASPI. But when I say this, people often have a knee jerk reaction which is along the lines of: “How can you support genocide or another Holocaust, you’re evil.” Which is the exact problem because the whole premise of the discussion has been completely warped by so called accepted “truths“ and people manipulating our emotions in a classic appeal to pathos. Could the world really be this cartoonishly black and white and good and evil, where my side is morally righteous and our adversaries are morally despicable? This is exactly what Orwell described in his essay, “Politics and the English Language.” Regarding the concentration camps narrative, just Google ASPI and you’ll realise that about 70% of this narrative originates from them. Not only that but they’re literally funded by the military industrial complex (e.g. Northrup Grumman, Thales) and their plan worked because Australia recently bought billions of dollars worth of crappy missiles from the very companies that sponsor this so called “think tank”. It’s most definitely NOT a conspiracy theory and it’s very revealing that these think tanks can be this brazen. If you want to get to the root of this, just search for the origin of common narratives like this one and you’ll find it’s just a handful of sources all repeating the same misleading points. You’ll be shocked at how easily narratives can be seeded in the media. https://www.afr.com/policy/foreign-affairs/the-think-tank-behind-australia-s-changing-view-of-china-20200131-p53wgp https://www.afr.com/policy/foreign-affairs/the-think-tank-be... And this video is kind of memey but you get the gist. https://youtu.be/_fHfgU8oMSo https://youtu.be/_fHfgU8oMSo